Every Other Weekend
by Alianne Potter-Black
Summary: One weekend a year, Andromeda Tonks lets go. There is a little cursing near the end...be warned.


**Disclaimer:** I do not own this...

It is the product of over thinking things...

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**Every Other Weekend**

On Friday she gets dressed up and goes out for the night with some old friends from school. She lets herself smile, laugh and just be generally happy. Sometimes she dances others she just sits and watches as the young ones have fun on the dance floor. On Friday she lets herself forget.

(Once she makes the mistake of going out with the wrong friend. He got her extremely drunk at this one muggle bar and got into a fight with a bloke that looked like a pig in a wig. She almost let him hit her, but she was drunk and so was he and Harry came and made it all better. (Bless that child; she doesn't know what she'd do without him).)

On Saturday she pulls out all her old cookbooks and spends the entire day in the kitchen. She decides early on what her theme will be and just immerses herself in whatever it is. One time she gets completely covered from head to toe in flour and egg and has no idea how. Another time she almost burns down the kitchen. On Saturday, she makes herself think.

(It's been another year and she still can't get over the fact that it's been _another year._ So tonight she makes his favorite dish and she puts on her favorite dress and plays his favorite song and transports her self to another time, fifty or so years back.)

On Sunday, she doesn't open the windows. She doesn't check the post, or answer the phone. She stays in her pajamas and looks through old photo albums. There are so very many memories. Sometimes she lets herself cry; sometimes she shares the photos with Teddy if he's there; and sometimes (and it happens more and more as the years go by), sometimes she smiles. Sometimes that smile just stays as it is, others, it turns into a laugh, because how can you not laugh at that silly memory. On Sunday she lets herself remember.

(After about five years she has the courage to take off her wedding ring. Her hand feels almost naked without that little silver band around the third finger, but she puts it on a chain and hangs it around her neck, and feels a bit better.)

On Monday she goes out. Sometimes she goes over to the Burrow talks with Molly and Arthur about everything from the children at Hogwarts now to whether or not they're ever going to sell this rickety old house and buy a better one. Other times she goes to the store. Once she got lost in the muggle underground and had to act like a tourist. On Monday she makes herself face the world.

(As the week passes and she goes on with her life she tries to look forward to something she can't ever really see happening. She amazes herself when every week she makes it back to Friday when she can go out again, this time with Teddy and his wife. (It's so hard to believe he's twenty-four and has a child on the way…))

It's Saturday again, and she's sitting on her knees in the rain in a graveyard, crying her eyes out, wishing life were different. She's screaming to the stones in front of her asking why they had to be so damn brave; why they had to be so damn _Gryffindor_. And as she picks her self up, and tries to no avail to pull her self back together, she thinks about the one weekend of the year when she makes her self be strong. Because every other weekend, she's just Andromeda Tonks, an old woman who lost her real life close to thirty years ago. And every other weekend, when she tries to pull herself together, most of the time…she does.

(There's one year when Teddy and his wife are out of town that one horrible weekend and she has to baby-sit for a six year old Dora and she fails to realize that the poor dear isn't quite asleep and walks in on her dancing with herself on Saturday night and wants to know why Nana's wearing that 'awful dress that daddy hates so much'. Andromeda tells her that she will show her in the morning, and when she does, she finds herself letting go. And soon after that, every other weekend isnt quite so hard to get through.)

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hope you enjoyed...please review


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